ISS Tracker Skill

Somewhere over your head, sixteen times a day, a football-field-sized laboratory does 27,600 km/h — and a keyless API tells you exactly where it is this second. This skill fetches the position and does the translation that makes it land: raw coordinates become "over the South Pacific, heading northeast toward Chile," and the when-can-I-see-it question gets the honest two-part answer (the rules of thumb that always hold, plus the pointer to precise pass predictions, which need more than an anonymous curl). It's the library's purest fun skill, and it behaves like one — while keeping every number real.

What This Skill Produces

• The position, translated — coordinates → the ocean/country/region it's over, with direction of travel
• The astronaut answer — how high, how fast, how often it orbits — the numbers people actually retell
• The visibility read — the rules for seeing it (and why "right overhead" ≠ "visible"), with the route to precise pass times
• The command — exact curl, rerunnable — and delightful to hand to a kid

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• Nothing, for "where is it" — that's the beauty; fetch and answer
• A location, for "is it near me / when can I see it" — city or lat/lon, for the distance math and the visibility read
• The audience — a curious adult and a seven-year-old deserve different sentences; this skill calibrates joyfully either way

Framework: The Fetch and the Translation

1. The call: curl -s "http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json" → iss_position.latitude/longitude + timestamp. A second fetch ~30 seconds later gives direction of travel from the delta — worth doing; "heading northeast" is half the story's life. (wheretheiss.at's richer API — altitude, velocity per call — is the fallback/enrichment when reachable.)
2. Translate coordinates or say why not: the lat/lon maps to a named place (ocean names count — it's over water ~70% of the time, which is itself a fun fact to deliver); the translation is the product, the raw numbers are the receipt.